Despite the advances in electronic document storage in recent years, paper based documents are still required for many reasons by businesses, including readability and record maintenance. As a result, the use of printers is extensive and growing. The costs associated with printers can be significantly high, and it may therefore be extremely beneficial to many businesses to know what their printer resource usage is so that the costs associated therewith may be determined for accounting purposes. Furthermore, this information may also assist in determining how the printing requirements for a given business may best be met in the most economically efficient manner by using various network configurations or printers that are on the market.
To this end, a certain amount of print information may be obtained from the operating system on any particular individual personal computer, or on any network of computers. However, the information that may be gleaned from operating system records or logs is often limited. Although the operating system may provide information as to when a print job was requested and by whom, for example, it generally will not provide information about the attributes that were selected with the print job. Such attributes may include, for example, sorting, stapling, double-sided printing, paper size, amount of toner/ink expended, etc.
Various attempts have been made in the prior art to account for printer usage. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,216,113 to Aikens et al. discloses an electronic network transaction recording system for accumulating billing data for printing machines interconnected to multiple work stations on the network. A network administrator includes a memory for storing data representing usage of selected printers and a decoder for validating a print job request and a billing account number. This usage data and billing information is provided by the user via a user interface which is prompted when a user requests a print job. Requests for print jobs are verified based on the billing information and billed to an individual or group billing account number.
While the above approach does provide certain advantages, such as attributing printing charges to billing account numbers, it may be disadvantageous for tracking printer resource usage in some circumstances. For example, if one wishes to track the usage of particular printers for resource deployment purposes, it may be cumbersome to require users to type usage data and billing information into a user interface for each print request. Moreover, the above system may not account for print usage on local printers, or printing that is done remotely by users with laptop computers, for example.